Martin Heidegger quotes

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in existentialism and phenomenology. His major work, "Being and Time," explores the meaning of existence and human experience. He has profoundly impacted modern philosophy, literature, and critical theory. Here are 90 of his quotes:

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

Martin Heidegger

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

Martin Heidegger

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

Martin Heidegger

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Martin Heidegger

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

Martin Heidegger

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

Martin Heidegger

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Martin Heidegger

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Martin Heidegger

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Martin Heidegger

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

Martin Heidegger

Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.

Martin Heidegger

Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.

Martin Heidegger

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

Martin Heidegger

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N. S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

Martin Heidegger

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."

Martin Heidegger

Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.

Martin Heidegger

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

Martin Heidegger

If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.

Martin Heidegger

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.

Martin Heidegger

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

Martin Heidegger

The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small” precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats” and who can transform it in an original manner.

Martin Heidegger

Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.

Martin Heidegger